Posts Tagged ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’

You know it’s late summer when the trailers for dramatic films start trickling out. Today, thanks to FirstShowing.net, we’ve got the trailer for Hunger and Shame director Steve McQueen’s latest, 12 Years a Slave. Telling the true story of Solomon Northup (the always-fantastic Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. (Before clicking “Play,” the faint of heart among you may want to be assured that this green band trailer doesn’t show anything particularly hard to look at.)

I think most people who saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey would agree that it was overlong and a little too video gamey in some of the action scenes. Tolkein purists will object to the addition of Legolas… but they probably haven’t been on board with much about this trilogy (and some didn’t care for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for that matter).

Well, what we see here in this first trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug looks a bit like more of the same, but at least we’re past the slow, introductory bits and into the meat of the story, so perhaps it will be more fun. In any case, as a movie tech nerd, I’ll see it for the high frame rate, which I thought looked wonderful outside of some very brightly lit scenes (a shortcoming of the cameras Jackson used, not high frame rate as a technology, I think).

In December 2012, Peter Jackson goes back to well with the first of the two-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit.

As trailers go, it isn’t terribly exciting, although there’s a healthy amount of footage, a song, a whole bunch of dwarves, Gollum, and even Frodo (in a framing sequence, of course). It all looks and sounds pretty much like Lord of the Rings all over again, but with somewhat smaller stakes — at least in this first part. And while that’s sure to please the most ardent fans of the trilogy, as someone who enjoyed but never really fell in love with them, it didn’t really stir up any strong impressions in me. (I was one of the few who’d hoped Guillermo del Toro would direct these, as he’d have brought something new to the equation, but alas.)